A LITTLE tight...

(Wayback machine setting--July 21, 2011...)
When I was a very small boy, I picked cotton a few times. Occasionally I'd ride to the cotton gin (Forget your hayride—sink into a trailer full of fresh cotton sometime. Now THAT's cushy!) and watch it being sold, and vacuumed out of the trailer, and run through the gin and baled. It was noisy and strange and lots of fun.

Today I took my truck to a cotton gin in the middle of nowhere. There I backed into a dock and walked past a row of strange noisy machines looking for the office. In the office I got my bills of lading and returned to the truck, walking past those noisy things again on the way.

The gin machinery looks more or less the way it did when I was far younger. I wasn't expecting that. Granted the technology is nearly 200 years old now, but I was still a bit surprised. It really hasn't changed much at all in the last 50.

They wrap the bales in plastic now. In my youth they used a sort of cloth covering, so coarse you couldn't tell whether it was more like a tow sack* or a net. That seems to be the biggest change in the last generation or so.

I recognized it all. And I'd forgotten it until today.

Especially I'd forgotten the smell. Freshly-picked cotton has a pleasant smell. Kind of like a bakery, in some ways. But not quite.

Getting there was an adventure. I've discussed the joys of GPS forever. I may have mentioned that the customer directions can be almost as much fun. Sometimes this is because they don't know what they're talking about. Other times they don't know how to get it across.

Then there are the times when they forget I'm not coming in a car.

It never occurs to most people that a road looks very different when you're in a vehicle that's 80 feet long, 8 ½ feet wide, 13 ½ feet tall, and weighs anywhere from 15 to 40 tons. Sometimes this leads them to lead you under 12-foot overpasses, or around hairpin turns, or through peaceful residential neighborhoods with watchful police officers.

In this case, it led me up a two-lane county road in which each lane was EXACTLY the width of my tractor-trailer. As in, my wheels were touching the painted stripes on both sides of the truck. And there wasn't a shoulder to speak of

And that was on the straightaways. A truck takes up more of the road on a curve.

Then, just about the time I had gotten used to watching the mailboxes skim by in mute terror, and the cars and farm tractors trying to find enough shoulder to give me a wide berth, I saw the bridge.

Ordinary looking little thing. The interesting part was the sign that said “WEIGHT LIMIT: Tractor-trailers, 27 tons.”

Empty, I weigh between fifteen and twenty tons.** No problem. But when I came out, I was going to be closer to forty.

It bore thinking on.

Fortunately, the nice lady in the gin office knew a more sensible way out. She said she didn't even give the route I'd followed to cars—at certain times of the day you spend all your time stuck behind John Deere's.

(So who had given it to us? I wondered. But since it obviously hadn't been her, I didn't ask.)

I thanked her politely and went back to the truck. Walking slowly. Breathing in fresh cotton.
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*Tow is a material made from what's left over after you've turned flax into linen. It's strong, rough, and scratchy. Nobody wants to wear the stuff, but it makes a pretty good material for heavy-duty bags. Old-fashioned potato sacks or feed bags, for instance...

**I mean, the tractor, the trailer, and I. Honest, that's what I mean...

Not as tough as you think

2012/09/06
Northbound on the West Virginia Turnpike, I passed a truck that had been hauling bricks on a flatbed.

HAD been hauling bricks.

HAD been a truck.

Apparently it had sideswiped a granite wall. Brick dust all over the highway, intact bricks mixed in like chunks of carrot in a bowl of soup. The trailer was on its side, half its load still strapped in place.

Ahead of it, something that might have been a truck once. I couldn't tell. Behind it, a long trail of clothes, knick-knacks, and scraps of canary-yellow fiberglass that I have to assume had once been a sleeper.

God, I hope nobody was taking a nap in it.

In the movies, eighteen-wheelers are juggernauts. Unstoppable THINGS that crush hapless vacationers like bugs while their drivers grin maniacally. Truth is, they're just big. Armor plate would be that much less weight they could haul. So they're actually flimsier for their weight than a car. And most of that weight is in a lump behind you, still moving when the truck has abruptly stopped. Ready to turn your vehicle into an accordion.

Or, in this case, to scrape the cab off the frame with the side of a mountain.

Maybe they got out all right.